Which Macs Can Run Aperture 3?

by admin on March 30, 2010

The other night, I got a little restless and went on a little photo-walk on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Eventually, I came to the Apple Store by Central Park and popped my head in to see how Aperture 3 runs on different types of Macs. Apple makes it easy by loading all their software on all the computers in the store, so you can get hands on experience with just about everything before you buy.

Here’s the skinny – Aperture 3 ran fine on every machine in the store, ranging from the lowly Macbooks to the beastly Mac Pros with the beastly 30-inch monitors. I played around with a lot of things, stuff like switching views, playing with adjustment brushes, making level and curve adjustments – all the regular stuff people do with Aperture.

However, on the lower-end machines, Aperture was a bit slower when it came to handling the huge RAW files that originated from medium-format backs. Smaller RAW files from Canon and Nikon cameras were fine, but the 60-megabyte+ portrait files from the Leaf Aptus were a big drag on performance. For example, when using the skin smoothing brush, it would take a few seconds for the effect to register on the screen. This isn’t a real problem because anyone with a digital medium-format back is almost certainly using a very powerful Mac and isn’t even using Aperture – they’re probably going with Capture One.

The bottom line – most Macs will run Aperture 3 just fine, even a little better than Aperture 2, which works great on my early-2008 Macbook.